Helmet on display in the Olympia Archaeological Museum, Peloponnese - Greece
(via crystalbluepersuasion)
an ordinary ethnography
thoughts from an average bipedal hominid
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2013-03-26 1,842 notes
Source: okkvlt
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2013-01-29 252 notes
indiana jones and the idol as rene magritte’s the son of man
from ben6835
(via theolduvaigorge)
Source: greatgerbil
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2013-01-20 273 notes
Jug
Cyclades
Found on Aegina
c.675-650 BC
Archaic Cycladic pottery jug with a spout in the form of a griffin’s head; wheel-made body with moulded details; globular-ovoid body on a low conical foot; long narrow neck terminating in a griffin-head spout; vertical handle from shoulder to neck; made of pale clay decorated with brown lustrous paint: on the body is a lion dragging a stag, and two horses, below which are panels of geometric motifs; anatomical details of the griffin are also painted.
Source: British Museum
(via gardant)
Source: ancientpeoples
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2012-12-15 36 notes
Machu Picchu - 16 Gigapixels
This is amazing
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2012-12-13 299 notes
Gilded bronze 3-Dimensional mechanical mandala, Tibetan.
British Museum, London.
(via ljspillowbook)
Source: kelledia
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2012-12-08 194 notes
This 8,000 year-old giraffe rock carving in DaBous, Niger is considered one of the finest petroglyphs in the world. The giraffe has a leash on its nose implying some level of taming the animals. It was found relatively recently on the top of a granite hill by local Touaregs and dates to the Kiffian era of 7,000 - 9,000 years ago.
Source: Boston.com
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2012-12-06 20 notes
Cavemen were much Better at Illustrating Animals than Artists Today
The iconic caveman in popular culture is Fred Flintstone: slow-witted and unskilled. In general, we think of the cave art produced by prehistoric people as crude and imprecise too—a mere glimmer of the artistic mastery that would blossom millenia later, during the Renaissance and beyond.
If this is your impression of prehistoric humans, a new study published today in PLOS ONE by researchers from Eotvos University in Budapest, Hungary, might surprise you. In analyzing dozens of examples of cave art from places such as Lascaux, the group, led by Gabor Horvath, determined that prehistoric artists were actually better at accurately depicting the way four-legged animals walk than artists from the 19th and 20th centuries. Read More
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2012-12-02 21 notes
In Istanbul, A Byzantine-Era Fleet Surfaces Again
In Istanbul, major public transit projects are back under way after years of paralysis. The problem wasn’t a lack of financing, but the layer upon layer of ancient artifacts that turned up every time the earthmovers started their work.
The excavation began eight years ago on projects intended to ease Istanbul’s notoriously clogged traffic.
The job included building a tunnel under the Bosphorus Strait and linking it to a rail and subway network. When the dig was stopped several years ago, eyes rolled and shoulders shrugged.
Istanbul is, after all, one of those grand and ancient places — like Rome, Athens or Jerusalem — where this kind of thing tends to happen often. Read More
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2012-11-30 17 notes
Desecration: Unearthed Native Burial Site Causes Uproar
The summer sky drizzles rain as Arden Kucate and Theresa Pasqual drive toward a nondescript field in eastern Arizona. On this overcast day in August, they are heading to a place their ancestors called home centuries ago.
There, an adobe compound, known as Amity Pueblo, toppled by time, is a mound of rubble disguised by a carpet of shrubs and grass.
When they arrive, Pasqual navigates her truck just a few feet past an opening in the feeble fence surrounding the area when Kucate abruptly tells her to stop.
He spots a bone in their path.
Kucate and Pasqual slide out of the pickup, stunned into silence as they gaze upon not just that bone but thousands of shattered bones and artifacts strewn across acres. Read More
“They didn’t follow the laws, and now it’s a disaster.”
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2012-11-27 17 notes
Face-to-Face
Following a subtle trail of artifacts, a Canadian archaeologist searches for a lost chapter of New World history.
Something about the strange strands didn’t fit. Patricia Sutherland spotted it right away: the weird fuzziness of them, so soft to the touch.
The strands of cordage came from an abandoned settlement at the northern tip of Canada’s Baffin Island, far above the Arctic Circle and north of Hudson Bay. There indigenous hunters had warmed themselves by seal-oil lamps some 700 years ago. In the 1980s a Roman Catholic missionary had also puzzled over the soft strands after digging hundreds of delicate objects from the same ruins. Made of short hairs plucked from the pelt of an arctic hare, the cordage bore little resemblance to the sinew that Arctic hunters twisted into string. How did it come to be here? The answer eluded the old priest, so he boxed up the strands with the rest of his finds and delivered them to the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec.
Years passed. Then one day in 1999 Sutherland, an Arctic archaeologist at the museum, slipped the strands under a microscope and saw that someone had spun the short hairs into soft yarn. The prehistoric people of Baffin Island, however, were neither spinners nor weavers; they stitched their clothing from skins and furs. So where could this spun yarn have come from? Sutherland had an inkling. Years earlier, while helping to excavate a Viking farmhouse in Greenland, she had seen colleagues dig bits of similar yarn from the floor of a weaving room. She promptly got on the phone to an archaeologist in Denmark. Weeks later an expert on Viking textiles informed her that the Canadian strands were dead ringers for yarn made by Norse women in Greenland. “That stopped me in my tracks,” Sutherland recalls.
The discovery raised tantalizing questions that came to haunt Sutherland and drive more than a decade of dogged scientific sleuthing. Had a Norse party landed on the remote Baffin Island coast and made friendly contact with its native hunters? Did the yarn represent a key to a long lost chapter of New World history? Read More
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2012-11-25 1,875 notes
Source: aleyma
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2012-11-24 6 notes
Terracotta jug. Base Ring Ware, Cyprus, ca. 1600-1450 BC (via The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
(via crystalbluepersuasion)
Source: metmuseum.org
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2012-11-23 67 notes
Moctezuma headdress stirs passions in Mexico, Austria
VIENNA — Steeped in myth and legend, the “Penacho”, a feather headdress supposedly worn by Aztec emperor Moctezuma II, continues to stir up passion in Austria and Mexico as it goes on display again after a years-long restoration.
Some say it was brought to Europe by Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes, others that it was used by an Aztec high priest.
In any case, the vibrant green-and-blue headpiece — the only one of its kind still in existence — remains at the centre of a tug-of-war between Mexico, which wants to bring it home, and Austria, which argues it is too fragile to be transported. Read More
Read this for its description of a truly marvelous artifact. But please ignore the Austrians and their “good publicity for Mexico” malarkey.
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2012-11-21 11 notes
Searching for Doggerland
For decades North Sea boatmen have been dragging up traces of a vanished world in their nets. Now archaeologists are asking a timely question: What happens to people as their homeland disappears beneath a rising tide?
When signs of a lost world at the bottom of the North Sea first began to appear, no one wanted to believe them. The evidence started to surface a century and a half ago, when fishermen along the Dutch coast widely adopted a technique called beam trawling. They dragged weighted nets across the seafloor and hoisted them up full of sole, plaice, and other bottom fish. But sometimes an enormous tusk would spill out and clatter onto the deck, or the remains of an aurochs, woolly rhino, or other extinct beast. The fishermen were disturbed by these hints that things were not always as they are. What they could not explain, they threw back into the sea.
Generations later a resourceful amateur paleontologist named Dick Mol persuaded the fishermen to bring him the bones and note the coordinates of where they had found them. In 1985 one captain brought Mol a beautifully preserved human jawbone, complete with worn molars. With his friend, fellow amateur Jan Glimmerveen, Mol had the bone radiocarbon-dated. It turned out to be 9,500 years old, meaning the individual lived during the Mesolithic period, which in northern Europe began at the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago and lasted until the advent of farming 6,000 years later. “We think it comes from a burial,” says Glimmerveen. “One that has lain undisturbed since that world vanished beneath the waves, about 8,000 years ago.” Read More
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2012-11-20 15 notes
Oldest examples of hunting weapon uncovered in South Africa
Scientists working in South Africa have unearthed the oldest-known spear tips, apparently made by a common ancestor of people and Neandertals around 500,000 years ago.
More than 200 stone points found at a site called Kathu Pan 1 display modifications and damage consistent with having been attached to spear handles and hurled at animal prey such as springbok, say Jayne Wilkins, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto, and her colleagues.
